SanDisk Corporation unveiled a revolutionary all-flash storage platform that creates a new category for the IT industry, termed by IDC as “Big Data Flash.” Built using open source software, SanDisk’s InfiniFlash storage system delivers massive capacity, extreme performance, and superior reliability to big data and hyperscale workloads, while significantly reducing data center complexity and costs.
According to IDC, the market for flash-based arrays—both All Flash Arrays (AFA) and Hybrid Flash Arrays (HFA)—exhibited strong double digit growth over the past five years for a combined market that in 2014 was over $11.3B in size. This growth is largely being driven by rapid migration to 3rd platform computing infrastructure, resulting from the massive storage, compute power and scalability requirements of an increasingly mobile workforce, social media, big data analytics, and cloud computing.
InfiniFlash is the next generation storage platform. Available in three different configurations (IF100, IF500 and IF700), this breakthrough offering provides 5x the density, 50x the performance and 4x the reliability, while consuming 80 percent less power – as compared to traditional hard disk drive (HDD) arrays – and far surpasses the capabilities of existing all-flash arrays which focus solely on performance. InfiniFlash also delivers breakthrough pricing for an all-flash hardware solution at less than $1 per gigabyte (GB), and breaks the $2 per GB barrier for an all-flash system[4] without requiring compression or de-duplication technologies.
“Building on our long history of industry-defining innovation, we are very excited to bring our first all flash array storage system to market in the form of a category-defining product that we expect will drive flash into big-data workloads at massive scale,” said Sumit Sadana, executive vice president and chief strategy officer, SanDisk. “By offering InfiniFlash below $2/GB before compression and de-duplication, we are changing the industry dynamics in favor of dramatically broader flash adoption in new hyperscale and enterprise workloads.”
Through the disaggregation of compute, switching and storage capabilities, InfiniFlash enables the use of flash for primary and secondary storage with new benchmarks in low total acquisition costs and extremely compelling total cost of ownership (TCO). The InfiniFlash system is configured with up to 64 specially-designed, hot-swappable cards, each providing an unprecedented 8TB of flash capacity. Together, the cards deliver half a petabyte (PB) (512 terabytes (TB)) of raw flash storage in a 3-rack-unit (3U) enclosure, which is able to connect with up to eight off-the-shelf servers.
The InfiniFlash system’s modular storage design supports various operating system and storage stack offerings. It includes the award-winning, performance-optimized SanDisk ION Accelerator software stack, from Fusion-io, for block storage applications. For scale-out block and object storage workloads, InfiniFlash utilizes the ‘flash-intelligent’, open source CEPH platform to deliver enterprise-class data services. These offerings include development libraries and a software development kit (SDK) that allow customers to optimize applications for use with the system in order to obtain even better performance, efficiency and TCO.
SanDisk continues to work with its OEM partners to bring innovative flash solutions to market. SanDisk will also leverage its relationships with channel partners, value-added resellers and system integrators to deploy InfiniFlash and other SanDisk flash-powered solutions for enterprise and hyperscale customers. InfiniFlash system service, maintenance, and support are also provided by SanDisk and its go-to-market partners.